If you have a website that gets a great number of daily visitors and has many specific technical configurations, you may be wondering if you need high capacity web hosting instead of a regular shared web hosting plan. You might be thinking that a high capacity plan could provide you with a faster connection for your customers and more disk space. Perhaps you are questioning if choosing this type of web host would be the best idea for your website.

The best way to know if you need a high capacity hosting plan is to consider the bandwidth of your current plan and how well your website functions at that bandwidth. Not sure what bandwidth is? An easy way to understand bandwidth is to think of it as a pipe. Information from your website flows through that pipe to customers. Your pipe needs to be wide enough to allow the right number of customers to easily come and go from your website. If you have more customers than your pipe can handle, the pipe will get backed up and customers will not be able to load up your site very well or very quickly. If this is an issue for you (or you anticipate it to be an issue soon), you need more pipes. In other words, you need more bandwidth–and a higher capacity web host.

First of all, there are many types of web hosting packages that are available through various web host providers that are labeled as high capacity. So, each web host has a different concept of what high capacity hosting actually is. For many providers, all it takes to turn a regular hosting plan into a high capacity plan is to increase the storage space to anywhere from 500 MB to 2 GB and to increase the bandwidth up to 10 GB to 50 GB per month. They may add more FTP accounts and SQL databases. It is also common for these web hosts to increase the number of email lists, subdomains, parked domains, and more in their high capacity packages.

Other websites have a different concept of what high capacity hosting should be. These sites believe that regular shared hosting may not be suitable for larger and busier websites. But, instead of insisting upon a dedicated server situation (which can be very costly and difficult to manage), these web hosts offer a a special high capacity hosting in which certain servers are used by less than twenty accounts. The host also increases the disk space and bandwidth for each account. This type of package does cost more than regular shared hosting packages; however, it allows webmasters to have the easy management of a shared server with the extra resources of a high capacity package.

You can, of course, choose to go with the ultimate type of high capacity web host plan–a dedicated server. But, these plans are best only for the largest and busiest websites because they are quite expensive and because they require a good deal of technical knowledge.